- DEMOS: LAOCRACY OR PATHOCRACY 1 -

Laocracy as a direct, proportional and continuous referendum substitute for representative democracy: indirect, problematic and spasmodic. PeaceWorld suggestions for the architecture of the World Agora and its info politics. Otherwise, pathocracy: the WeaponWorld rule of sociopaths.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/

LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/

APPRENTI texte integral (2024) et chapitres

Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort

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WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
 
- DEMOS: LAOCRACY OR PATHOCRACY 1 -

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried from time to time.” Winston Churchill.

 First of all, what is this Pathocracy? It is the rule of sociopaths. See the chapter dedicated to them and their governance.

Sociopaths are people (four percent of the population: 3% of men and 1% of women; this percentage varying by home country and its nutrition). They can tell right from wrong but feel no remorse from the latter. They inflict pain, misery and suffering on the rest of us because they are bored and have nothing better to offer themselves. Think of vampires who don’t thirst for blood but for the suffering of others (thus their philosophical insistence on stoicism… aimed at their victims). 

Good conscience is a complex set of calculations the human brain performs to figure out (both ahead of time and afterwards) the moral consequences of its behavior, the same way subconscious calculations (fewer but still numerous) let us stay upright on a bicycle. Sociopaths lack this primary capacity of conscience. 

Humanity’s institutions have been taken over by sociopaths, sooner or later but almost always permanently. Even Christ’s sacred Love was subverted by bloody-handed Inquisitors in the past and more recently by sexual predators avid to rape the innocent. 

Those of us who are conscience-driven would never inflict so much suffering on so many people unless we had been ruled over, trained and guided (and our literatures, philosophies and sacred texts, certified) by a historical succession of conscience-amputees. In the absence of their deviant guidance and rule, the world could become a near-utopia. It would liberate itself spontaneously because it was finally under the control of our collective moral conscience. Rights, justice and truth would become clearer in most cases, often much more so than they are today. There would still be problems with evil and wrongdoing, just as in our private lives, but a lot fewer a lot less influential. 

Is that clear?

Democracy unimproved does not serve peace management, even though reactionaries and progressives support it with equal fervor. Reactionaries, because they recognize that kleptocracy, oligarchy, National Capitalism and corporate fascism – the politics of disinformation they conceal behind the expression “democracy” – are repulsive, inexcusable and fruitless in the long run; Progressives, from bankrupt imagination after millennia of serial defeat. 

At best, current democracies remain elitist because their systems are “representative” and winner-take-all rather than direct and proportional. They promote the professional politician, an over-specialized breed that’s supposed to have mastered the complexities of civic power and popular opinion. Yet they’ve achieved very little, in the final analysis, beyond electoral shenanigans and the trickeries of campaign finance. 

Laocracy requires absolute private equity, personal emancipation, elaborate safeguards against exploitation, and lots more free time to philosophize. It requires that we raise rare and beloved children into healthy adults, and that an enlightened public takes heed of ethical warnings in order to reduce unintended consequences. Finally, it would require that everyone valued their own Learning above all. 

In a Learner Laocracy, politicians would have strictly limited roles. They’d still satisfy their need to be admired, trusted and chosen on a competitive basis — after all, those are their topics of passion. Once elected, they will serve as social antennae, sounding out constituents for their problems and unmet requirements. Thereafter, they’ll submit those problems to the community of Learners whose topic of passion would be to solve them, and forward their solutions back to the people involved for them to pick and choose by vote. The Agora of PeaceWorld will assist this global conversation. 

Never again will politicians legislate fixes for social problems they were neither trained to resolve nor passionate enough to care about. They will not be allowed to bury problems and delay their resolution through procedural minutia and seek reward for their criminal negligence. In the first place, those corrupted to that extent could not run successfully for lowest rungs of power. Second, those tempted to do so, once in office, will stand out like butcher surgeons and be expelled by clear and expeditious regulations. 

Instead, honest politicians will serve their constituents in the same way honest judges will serve their juries: as specially trained guides and intimate advisers without decision-making powers. Decisions will be left to citizen voters and randomly selected juries, tamper-proof from their longstanding honor and orthodoxy.

We are not speaking here of a spotless paradise, but of reducing sacrifice and multiplying celebration. Avoid sacrificing anyone but yourself. Pick a celebration, pick several and celebrate them. Do it better! 

Democracies let the very rich handpick political candidates that best suit their needs. Any politician who fails this simple test is out of the running. Thus, the strong-willed, charismatic progressives we await so eagerly at every election usually fail to appear. 

The few good ones who evade this constraint, rich psychopaths can neutralize with the deftness of long practice. From the Gracchii to the Kennedys and from Martin Luther King to the next one in line, they’ve been co-opted, marginalized and assassinated with yawning ease by conspirators of greed. Oftentimes, these public murders are not even seriously investigated, for fear of civil war. Societies that ritualize capital punishment (or make their foremost protestors “disappear” into prison or unmarked graves) reserve certain extinction for the best leaders. Every time proletariats recover justice and abundance, this miscalculation is soon washed away in the blood and brains of its mastermind. 

What is the most perilous occupation in America? Alaska King Crab fisherman? Bomb disposal expert? No; more likely, progressive politician in recent years (especially during the era of Bush the Lesser). The following people suffered fatal plane wrecks before, during and after their time in office. The Kennedy family gets its own column.

 | Ernest Lundeen Clement W. Miller Birch E. Bayh, II Nicholas Begich Thomas Hale Boggs George W. Collins Jerry Litton George T. Leland Mel Carnahan Paul Wellstone | 1940 1962 1964* 1972* 1972* 1972* 1976 1989 2000 2002 | Joseph P. Kennedy Katheline Agnes Kennedy Cavendish Michael Joseph Kennedy Ted Kennedy (injured, aide died) John F. Kennedy, Jr. Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy Lauren Bessette   | 1944 1948 1949 1964* 1999 1999 1999   

* Same plane wrecks: one in 1964 (Bayh and Kennedy survived the crash even though an aide died), the other in 1972 (four fatalities).

In many cases, those people were not only progressives but leaders of the pack: exceptional doers and shakers, confirmed heads of the Democratic Party or groomed as such. Their recent replacements have been at best pale imitators (Gore), at worst center-right turncoats (the Clintons, Obama).

Only four confirmed right-wingers have perished in recent plane wrecks. There was Larry MacDonald, whose Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down over Russia in 1983 (a transparent conspiracy even by permissive American standards. Despite a flurry of lawsuits filed by grieving families and equally upset insurance companies, no court of law saw fit to investigate. Then  John Tower, Chairman of the Senate Commission by that name, investigating the Iran/Contra Scandal in 1991; the same year John H. Heinz crashed and died. Then the death by plane crash of Ted Stevens, defeated reactionary Senator from Alaska in 2010. Each threatened to expose political skeletons in the Republican closet. 

There were other casualties but their political affiliations were vague and they probably died by accident. Given how few true progressives are recruited into American politics and how many more reactionaries, such skewed mortality rates become even more unlikely. Some actuarial number cruncher should make a scientific tabulation of these disturbing anomalies. 

“Small d democratic” elections are falsified with impunity. Longstanding special interest groups are entrenched in electoral oversight agencies. What a coincidence! The more longstanding their authority, the fewer questions posed about their legitimacy and the more infractions they permit themselves without serious investigation and correction much less direct penalty, public discredit and reversal of consequences. 

Even during the 21st century, popular elections are falsified. Even when obvious transgressions are revealed, they go uncorrected, from the richest to the poorest of nations. We permit democratic swindles one after another and don’t challenge the swindlers for abusing our confidence. We ruin democracy by honoring it, since we refuse to confront influential creeps. Their tyranny worsens every time they get away with another transgression — all in the name of “sacred democracy.” 

Just as democratic revolutions overthrew tyrannical monarchy, a Learner revolution would overthrow the “republican” tyranny we live under. This time, for a change, we will replace weapon tyranny with a strictly peaceful and orderly government — never again with latest renewal of a deadlier weapon tyranny.

Democracy is the ideal political machine for a mature weapon state, but the insidious foe of peace values. Weapon governments derive at least four advantages from democracy:

·      Within carefully defined parameters, recruitment and promotion are based on service and loyalty to the elite. This setup is slightly better than hereditary replacement by sick, stupid or crazy nobles, their family and sycophants. 

·      Compared to prior weapon tyrannies, democracy permits a tidier transition to power. While elected figureheads replace one another with placid regularity, back-room power brokers determine whose political turf shrinks or grows in accordance with the interests of great wealth. Fewer messy riots and rebellions ensue, and not too much infighting; at least in theory, at least most of the time. 

·       Democracy grants the rich much more influence than their small numbers warrant. The richer they are and the fewer they are, the more powerful they grow in a democracy. This gives them undue political advantage despite the selfish rewards of their petty, private interests. The smaller the pool of decision-makers, the narrower and clumsier their solutions. Simple arithmetic. Plus the greater their vulnerability to takeover by their psychopathic offspring who inherit their rank and their sociopathic slaves.

·      Democracy gives info proletarians the illusion of a say in government with no practical consequences. Institutionalized ignorance excludes most proletarians from valid decision-making. Upholding the sham of grass roots power, political campaigns degenerate into sound bite sloganeering, irrelevant anecdotes, personality smears and uncorrected lies repeated systematically (Trump). By universal consent, nothing much of importance is debated in public.

Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders exposed this fourth defect quite clearly. During their presidential campaigns, they were strong reform candidates backed by well-staffed grass-roots organizations and significant popular support in every State of the Union. They offered carefully studied proposals to resolve current problems. Unlike their slippery counterparts, they described their positions clearly at mass rallies. Their run-of-the-mill opponents confessed they could never drum up the size and enthusiasm of their audiences, with the exception of Trump, later on, and his neofascist crowds given much more media coverage.

Mr. Nader was excluded from media debates, was never granted proportionate time. He was barred from big  Party conventions. And, worse yet, he was rejected by the people. The mass media had convinced them that their votes would be “wasted” if they dared to vote their conscience. Sanders fared no better. Later on, Trump got far more media coverage that anyone else including his Democratic adversary, Hillary Clinton.

In mature democracies, anyone who threatens to discuss policy in a serious manner is barred from public discourse. He is ignored with equal obstinacy, from above by the media and from below by sheep like members of majority parties. 

“As a form of government, democracy belongs to the future. It has so recently taken shape in the affairs and in the minds of men that it is still but a shadow of what it will become. Moreover, it is a form of government which will not exist in fact until social and economic, and even cultural, changes that have not yet occurred take place. … Mr. Henry Wallace speaks of the century of the common man — the democratic century — as a thing of the future. It has been well said that ‘the reason men feel that the democratic world must survive is not that it is perfectly realized, but that it is scarcely realized at all.’” Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think about War and Peace, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944, p 186. 

The word democracy comes from the Greek term, demos. Generally translated, demos signifies a parcel of rural land, its owners, and the “free” (because land-holding) citizenry. It can also mean the popular assembly, the township and the commune. Finally, it means the people’s authority or the will of the state. 

Laocracy comes from the Greek word laos: the crowd, the common folk, enlisted soldiers, the subjects of a prince and the masses in the Marxist sense. The Greek word laos is more functional than idiotes (people who won’t vote): the sport and soap opera addicts who pass for free citizens these days. 

Here’s how Democracy differs from Laocracy. Democrats call themselves realists because they consider social contradictions and the resulting injustice inevitable and proper, whereas Laocrats will value freedom and justice as self-reinforcing necessities to be promoted many fewer exceptions and much less compromise.

Democrats dread the mob: the final arbiter of democratic injustice. In a Learner Commonwealth, the so-called mob would become an elegant source of tranquility, refinement and abundance. Its framework of massive stability will anchor the frenzied whirl of Laocracy’s countless gyroscopes. Learners will find better ways than mob violence to turn political frustration into new legislation and significant reform.

The term “laity” derives from the Greek word laos, which describes the mass of non-professionals. Laypeople differ from professionals in that amateurs waste a lot of time and energy in their first efforts, many of which go wrong through inexperience. Take my unreadable first drafts of Learners: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld during the 1990s, for example. Thereafter, laic performance can improve dramatically. Talented amateurs are only limited by the time and effort they will spend to improve their skills, and by their tendency over time to adopt the professional liabilities listed below. Their achievement curve differs radically from that of professionals, whose first efforts achieve maximum results and follow-ups achieve less and less.

Professionals do everything poorly from the get-go: the only way their professors taught them. Anything done differently – for better or for worse – raises a howl of professional controversy. Greater efficiency threatens the collective rice bowl. Professionals are taught to compromise their ethics in favor of internal cohesion and discipline. Faltering colleagues are shielded at the public’s expense, even though their competency and honesty may fall short of some pre-determined standard of mediocrity. 

In the past, record keeping made use of elaborate technologies and fragile media. It always needed them, just as it does today. Back then, literacy was an expensive, rare skill. A handful of young scholars underwent brutal training during which “by-the-book” solutions were etched onto their minds through a series of exhaustive examinations. Only one rote solution rated a passing grade, in an attempt to ensure consistent control across vast distances.

Graduates were dispatched into the cultural wilderness with a roll of scrolls or a basket of clay tablets, their skull filled with weapon clichés. The trip from a central school to their assigned post was tough, dangerous and expensive. Once they arrived, they were supposed to govern an ignorant info proletariat frozen for centuries in an information vacuum. This dusty silence was only interrupted by the occasional pony express rider bearing info elite proclamations, steadily heavier tax burdens and the rare, new business deal. Unlucky scholars were paired off with brutal strongmen. Endowed with military and police powers, these warlords enforced decisions after listening to scholarly advice — in theory. 

My friend Paul Lackman invoked Theodoric (yet another “Great” butcher), who sacked Rome with his Ostrogoths, then restored surviving Latin administrators (like Cassiodorus) to their civic duties – tax gathering, regulation and such. In theory, he confined his Goths to a military role. He only plucked the random wise guy like Boethius from his glass and ivory tower and had him jailed then executed. The condemned man had dared suggest that free intellect is superior to weapon management. History is full of such exemplary executions.

In China, a monolithic mandarinate emerged. No-one there could join the info elite without passing the imperial exam. The resulting bureaucracy became haughty, inflexible and rooted in past precedent. It turned into a stubborn orthodoxy averse to creativity, complexity and change. Mandarins tended to fling up their hands (if their creepy, long fingernails permitted) when fate stumped their stockpile of memorized clichés. They abandoned vast overseas markets and fumbled a technological edge centuries in advance of the West. They submitted to aggression, parochialism, misery and corruption —in obedience to the weapon dictates of mandarin certification. 

Brilliant Learners initiated a Golden Age of Western technology; they nearly sparked a comparable Golden Age under the emperor-gods, and Wu of Han (156-87 AEC), Taizong of Tang (599-649) and Yongle of Ming (1360-1424). China declined under subsequent mandarin control. Nothing deadens creativity like mandatory academic certification for positions of responsibility. It is the next worst alternative (though perhaps the tidiest) when changing circumstances demand social transformation. Of course, the worst alternative is the promotion of public officials through violence: the alternative that weapon cultures resort to automatically during wartime crises and ensuing revolutions. 

The shared characteristics of Mandarinates and university systems show up as consistently in ancient China as in the modern West. Form and appearance supersede content and results; allowable means justify deplorable ends. In both societies, packaging prevails over content. The questions “who” and “how” overshadow “why” and “for whom.” The mass obligation to certify one’s good intentions (and not to rock the boat) supersedes the menace of unintended consequences and their catastrophic outcomes. 

We are going to have to rock the boat in order to shift its burden and do so hard and soon, just to prevent it from swamping at the next set of rapids coming into view.

“The ends justify the means.” First coined by the Roman poet Ovid; Machiavelli used this expression in The Prince. Later on, Hitler and like-minded henchmen would abuse it. In other words, heroic outcomes justify horrific methods. For Hitler and his peers, ends and means became equally insane. Thanks to them, our debate over ends and means has reached a dead-end. Any talk of valid ends fades away these days, replaced by the microscopic examination of trivial means — preferably litigation-driven. Hitler’s self-contradiction is goose-stepped out any time someone advocates fair ends for their own sake. Please tell me, when we debate moral values, what are we doing quoting Hitler to each other? 

I quote Mein Kampf in a few chapters of this book, and do so with great care when he talks about some topic brought up here, then reveals his weapons intent as opposed to this book’s peaceful one. Quoting Hitler out of context will no doubt earn me censure from both sides of the aisle. I suspect that many people, who would never accept Leaner in any case or read any part of it, will use this as their excuse to reject every part of it. Too bad! Me and my book are honored to be rejected by such closed minds.

All I can say is this. I live on WeaponWorld and must use the material I find here. If I had restricted my analysis to nothing but honest peace texts, I’d never have assembled this work. By and large, similar peace messages never survived the review of dominant weapon mentors. 

The ultimate literary peace prize on this planet is to get your book blacklisted by the publishing industry (not “commercial” enough), torched by some fanatic or banned by the latest mass religion or ideology. It honors me and my work to be outcast this way.

Actually, the real-world formula for this debate is quite clear, based on outcomes. The ends parallel the means; the quality of ends justifies the quality of means. If adhered to honestly, good means bring good ends and bad means beget bad ends. Good ends don’t justify bad means nor do they result from them. In turn, bad means almost never achieve good ends. At the first sign of bad ends without corrective action, bad means take over in almost every case from then on. We need not wait for inevitable bad ends before stepping in to restore good means and ensure a better ending.

All this should be obvious; but it is not, thanks to our industrious abuse of this Hitler quote. Misusing this weapon myth, weapon mentors make us conclude that every means must be acceptably mediocre and every end, dismissed. According to up-to-date prejudice, good ends are irrelevant and good means, impractical. This is how we manage to starve hundreds of millions of babies every year without organized opposition, and how the trillions spent on weapons during the same interval never gets spent to promote peace.

An interesting illustration of this weapon myth is Dostoyevsky’s paradox concerning utopia. I believe it is found in “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, where one of his characters asks another something to this effect: 

“If you could guarantee utopia in perpetuity by torturing an innocent little girl to death, would you do it?” 

The correct answer? “The goals of utopia cannot be furthered by torturing an innocent child. On the contrary, such a crime would automatically set back utopia and its goals. Your paradox is another weapon myth. Shut your mouth, once and for all, you shameless reactionary and weapon mythmaker, and stop poisoning this discussion!”

Learners will call upon unlimited consultancies. Many info proletarians have a better grasp their topic of passion than equivalent professionals. Thousands of expert amateurs wait to be summoned to attend. Each social decision could be a unique, perfectly crafted custom job done fast and easy. Laocracy is practically on the horizon.

Like others among our treasured institutions, democracy is the end product of weapon mentality. Weapon managers have polished democracy for so long, they’ve turned it into a gleaming multi-tool in their blood-softened hands. Smug hypocrisy is all that we can expect from them. They look forward to putting miraculous, new, top-down, canned knowledge and artificial intelligence systems in control of everything and everyone. They’ve carefully ignored grass roots, Learner-driven alternatives obviously preferable. 

Like most of the global peace technologies we need, we can pull better alternatives right off the shelf of weapon technology and plug them back together for an honest peace. 

…

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- DEMOS: LAOCRACY OR PATHOCRACY 2 -